“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 80
bursting with a thousand dissonant impulses as he prayed for the bombs to drop. He
wanted to sob. The engines droned on monotonously like a fat, lazy fly. At last the
indices on the bombsight crossed, tripping away the eight 500-pounders one after the
other. The plane lurched upward buoyantly with the lightened load. Yossarian bent away
from the bombsight crookedly to watch the indicator on his left. When the pointer
touched zero, he closed the bomb bay doors and, over the intercom, at the very top of
his voice, shrieked: ‘Turn right hard!’ McWatt responded instantly. With a grinding howl
of engines, he flipped the plane over on one wing and wrung it around remorselessly in
a screaming turn away from the twin spires of flak Yossarian had spied stabbing toward
them. Then Yossarian had McWatt climb and keep climbing higher and higher until they
tore free finally into a calm, diamond-blue sky that was sunny and pure everywhere and
laced in the distance with long white veils of tenuous fluff. The wind strummed
soothingly against the cylindrical panes of his windows, and he relaxed exultantly only
until they picked up speed again and then turned McWatt left and plunged him right
back down, noticing with a transitory spasm of elation the mushrooming clusters of flak
leaping open high above him and back over his shoulder to the right, exactly where he
could have been if he had not turned left and dived. He leveled McWatt out with another
harsh cry and whipped him upward and around again into a ragged blue patch of
unpolluted air just as the bombs he had dropped began to strike. The first one fell in the
yard, exactly where he had aimed, and then the rest of the bombs from his own plane
and from the other planes in his flight burst open on the ground in a charge of rapid
orange flashes across the tops of the buildings, which collapsed instantly in a vast,
churning wave of pink and gray and coal-black smoke that went rolling out turbulently in
all directions and quaked convulsively in its bowels as though from great blasts of red
and white and golden sheet lightning.
‘Well, will you look at that,’ Aarfy marveled sonorously right beside Yossarian, his
plump, orbicular face sparkling with a look of bright enchantment. ‘There must have
been an ammunition dump down there.’ Yossarian had forgotten about Aarfy. ‘Get out!’
he shouted at him. ‘Get out of the nose!’ Aarfy smiled politely and pointed down toward
the target in a generous invitation for Yossarian to look. Yossarian began slapping at
him insistently and signaled wildly toward the entrance of the crawlway.
‘Get back in the ship!’ he cried frantically. ‘Get back in the ship!’ Aarfy shrugged
amiably. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he explained.
Yossarian seized him by the straps of his parachute harness and pushed him
backward toward the crawlway just as the plane was hit with a jarring concussion that
rattled his bones and made his heart stop. He knew at once they were all dead.
‘Climb!’ he screamed into the intercom at McWatt when he saw he was still alive.
‘Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb!’ The plane zoomed upward again in a
climb that was swift and straining, until he leveled it out with another harsh shout at
McWatt and wrenched it around once more in a roaring, merciless forty-five-degree turn
that sucked his insides out in one enervating sniff and left him floating fleshless in midair
until he leveled McWatt out again just long enough to hurl him back around toward
the right and then down into a screeching dive. Through endless blobs of ghostly black
smoke he sped, the hanging smut wafting against the smooth plexiglass nose of the
ship like an evil, damp, sooty vapor against his cheeks. His heart was hammering again
in aching terror as he hurtled upward and downward through the blind gangs of flak
charging murderously into the sky at him, then sagging inertly. Sweat gushed from his
neck in torrents and poured down over his chest and waist with the feeling of warm
slime. He was vaguely aware for an instant that the planes in his formation were no
longer there, and then he was aware of only himself. His throat hurt like a raw slash
from the strangling intensity with which he shrieked each command to McWatt. The
engines rose to a deafening, agonized, ululating bellow each time McWatt changed
direction. And far out in front the bursts of flak were still swarming into the sky from new
batteries of guns poking around for accurate altitude as they waited sadistically for him
to fly into range.